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A statistical project bleg (urgent-ish)

We all know that politicians can play it a little fast and loose with the truth. This is particularly true in debates, where politicians have to think on their feet and respond to questions from the audience or from each other.

Usually, we find out about how truthful politicians are in the “post-game show”. The discussion of the veracity of the claims is usually based on independent fact checkers such as PolitiFact. Some of these fact checkers (Politifact in particular) live-tweet their reports on many of the issues discussed during the debate. This is possible, since both candidates have a pretty fixed set of talking points they use, so it is near real time fact-checking.

What would be awesome is if someone could write an R script that would scrape the live data off of Politifact’s Twitter account and create a truthfullness meter that looks something like CNN’s instant reaction graph (see #7) for independent voters. The line would show the moving average of how honest each politician was being. How cool would it be to show the two candidates and how truthful they are being? If you did this, tell me it wouldn’t be a feature one of the major news networks would pick up…